Дмитро Бузько – письменник і кіносценарист Одеської Кіностудії ВУФКУ

Abstract

The article is dedicated to Dmytro Buzko – a Ukrainian writer and script writer of 1920-s, whose creative work has not yet been fully studied and appreciated as a phenomenon of literature. He was one of the founders of Ukrainian cinematography. Being among the first who made an attempt of laying scientific grounds of Ukrainian film production, he was also the first to apply the principles of cinematografic narration in his prose. His start as a writer is ascribed to his fulfilling a special ”important task” under the threat of death penalty. This task consisted in tracing the leader of the Chornomor Cosack army, Semen Zabolotny, who organised Antibolshevik rebelions in Odessa region and a number of terrorist attacks against the representatives of Soviet authorities in1920. These facts provided the basis for his first novel “The Beast of the Woods” (“Lisovyi Zvir”), published in 1923, which is believed to be the product of the author’s psychological relieve from what he had to undergo. In 1924 the plot was transformed into the first script by D. Buzko, who was to become one of the pioneers of Ukrainian cinematography. Later he took part in writing scripts for other Ukrainian films such as “McDonald” (1924) and “Taras Shevchenko” (1926), the latter was successful both in Ukraine and abroad, and one of the most successful films in 1926. The research into the composition and imagery of this work focuses on revealing the author’s/narrator’s dramatic psychological splitting as the central principle of the novel’s metanarrative. The main narrative technique in the novel is metalepsis, which is, on the one hand, the author’s constant interfering the events, but, on the other hand – the productive use of dialogisated monologue as a result of the hero’s metacontemplation. It has been observed that the narrative space of Buzko’s first novel is obviously influenced by cinematographic narration: the dominance of non-verbal messages, portrait details, the composition, cinematographic tech niques of acceleration and moderation etc. The peak of the author’s cinematographic talent was reached in the autobiographical nonel “Holandia” (1929). The article also focuses on the analysis of Buzko’s theoretical work “Cinematography and film production”, which promoted the new cinematographic art in Ukraine, both being a textbook for school libraries and meeting the market demands.